Personal mobile communication/computing devices, such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and two-way pagers, have become commonplace in many countries. These devices are referred to collectively herein as “mobile devices” or “wireless devices”. The current state-of-the-art of mobile devices has advanced far beyond that of their predecessors. For example, early cellular telephones were used analog signals to communicate over wireless telecommunications networks (or simply “wireless networks”) and were nothing more than mobile telephones. Today's cellular telephones typically are all digital and provide many other functions in addition to telephony capability. For example, many of the latest generation of mobile telephones (and other mobile devices) allow their users to play games, access World Wide Web pages, exchange email, exchange and download files, exchange short messaging service (SMS) messages, and send and receive video.
With new mobile devices providing a wider range of capabilities, there is increasing demand among the users of these devices (i.e., wireless services subscribers) for new and interesting types of digital content that can be used on these mobile devices, such as games and other applications, images, ring tones, screensavers, wallpapers, etc. Although newer mobile devices often come pre-provisioned with certain digital products when first acquired by the subscriber, it is desirable to allow subscribers to acquire additional digital products for use in their mobile devices as such products become available. While this capability already exists, currently subscribers acquire digital content directly from the content suppliers (typically via the wireless network and the Internet). This process is inconvenient if a subscriber wishes to acquire various different items of digital content from different suppliers, since the subscriber must navigate to the web sites of different suppliers. Therefore, it is further desirable to make many different types of digital content available to subscribers at one time through a centralized “store”.
From the content supplier's perspective, another impediment to the efficient distribution of digital content is the fact that different mobile devices often require different content packaging formats and provisioning protocols. In order to make a given item of digital content available to multiple mobile devices supporting different provisioning models, a digital content supplier will normally deploy that item of content multiple times, packaging it differently for each of the provisioning models. For example, an image to be delivered to Nokia-COD phones and Sprint-GCD OTA phones would be deployed twice, custom-packaged for each of those two delivery modes. It is very burdensome for digital content suppliers to have to package and provision the digital content they produce in a manner that is suitable for all of the devices in the marketplace. Moreover, it is difficult for content suppliers to keep up with the constant changes in device capabilities for the many mobile devices in the marketplace. Consequently, there is often a gap between the interoperability of a given digital product and how effective it can be used on a device. Therefore, the problem exists of how to efficiently allow many digital content providers to distribute many different types of digital content to subscribers using many different types of mobile devices.
A related problem is how to charge subscribers for the digital content they acquire. In one known system. The wireless carrier's system is capable of connecting to an external billing system and provides billing events to that system when a subscriber performs a chargeable action. However, this scenario assumes that all subscribers belong to a single organization that also owns the billing system. Furthermore, it assumes that a single currency is used. Yet many multi-national organizations have a parent company with subsidiaries in many countries. Different countries have different currencies, taxes and other charges. Each subsidiary may implement its own support/business infrastructure to deal with local regulations and customs, particularly with respect to the billing process. Consequently, the carrier's system must be able to generate billing events and direct them to the appropriate external billing system. Furthermore, it must be able to present the customer with a charge for each service, in the applicable currency and expressed in a way that is appropriate considering local taxes, fees and other regulations.
One way to address this problem, which only partially solves it, is to use credit card systems. In this scenario, the credit card company acts as an intermediary in the billing process. This approach consolidates all billing at one point. Settlement is done between the product/service provider and the subscriber provider (e.g., the wireless carrier) for a fee. This approach, however, does not handle the currency, taxes, fees and regulations issues mentioned above.